Author Archives: Karl

Some Perspective On Reagan

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This Friday I predicted to my friends that the constant coverage would come to an end this Monday. It has big time (dude – you know who you are – you owe me $20).

Second, for some perspective on Reagan, read Garret Vreeland in this dangerousmeta post. He never posts anything this long, and it’s worth the time to read it.

I was just a kid during the Reagan years, and my own point of view has less to do with what actually happened and much more to do with what entertainment, art, and the media had to say about things.

Garret rightly centers on the centrists. The “Reagan Democrats”. The “Clinton Republicans”. And he warns to watch for them. Witness my previous Howard Stern post.

Ya see, Howard is a centrist. I’m sure that leaves a few of you closed minded folks scratching your heads.

Get this straight: centrist doesn’t mean boring. It doesn’t mean “middle of the road” either.

While almost all of us lean one way or another – we know it’s not about towing the “party line”. We won’t be straight jacketed that way. We don’t accept these simplistic labels so easily. We know it’s all about voting for the best person.

Period.

There are a hell of a lot more of us then you. We’re just too damn silent. And the polarized atmosphere pushes us away.

Read this terrific NYTimes piece. Maybe we’re not so divided after all. Maybe, just maybe, its our ideologues, leaders, and the various other marketers in this world, who in their quest to sell us something, push us farther to the extremes. Push us farther apart. Push us until we grow so cynical we don’t think our singular votes matter.

They do. And hopefully they will this election.

Make a contribution to the Kerry campaign and make sure you are registered to vote.

Stern rallies listeners to Kerry

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“I?m both pro-Kerry and anti-Bush. More anti-Bush. I encourage people on the air and personally [to vote for him]. Here?s the deal, dude. It turns out the show has a lot of influence among swing voters, voters who are not Republican or Democrat, but intelligent enough to vote for the good candidate.” Stern said he has never met Kerry but considers him a “good guy.?
Stern?s listeners support Kerry over President Bush by a 10-point margin, according to a poll released last week

Read the rest in The Hill.

It’s Called The First Amendment – Look It Up

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“I am deeply convinced that President Bush’s political adversaries have no moral right to attack him over Iraq because they did exactly the same.

“It suffices to recall Yugoslavia. Now look at them. They don’t like what President Bush is doing in Iraq.”

That’s Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizing America’s democrats (Reuters) who are using their first amendment rights.

“At the very least, we have a right to know what he is saying to foreign leaders that makes them so supportive of his candidacy,” Vice President Dick Cheney said at a Republican fund-raiser in Arizona.

Yes we do Dick (CNN), yes we do.

“Web Logging Is to Teach Us More About Ourselves”

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I give credit to Dave Winer of Userland Software for inventing web logging, and I think the idea then was to publish, to share your thoughts with everyone else. But most people’s thoughts aren’t really worth sharing. Most web logs are little more than lists of annotated bookmarks and the value of those bookmarks can probably be best derived through a web aggregator, in which case people would be writing not to be read but to be counted, which isn’t nearly as much fun.

A lot of this comes down to production values, which is a subject those in the web log world tend to ignore because it is to their advantage to do so. There is a lot of bad television, but its packaging is such that we still seem to sit through the shows. Network TV spends perhaps $500,000 on an hour. How much do you spend on each web log entry? No wonder most web logs are so boring.

But Joe Reger wants us to not think so much about the web log publishing model and instead use the technology — preferably HIS technology — as a personal freeform database with analytical tools to take the measure of our own lives. Here we’ve been thinking about web logs as a way of reaching out to the world when they may be as much or even more useful reaching into ourselves.

I think he is onto something. Personal data mining means that I’d be mining my own data, learning about my own little world. If the FBI wanted to do that (they probably do) then I’d be opposed, but personal data mining offers personal payoffs. Imagine if your web log chirped up one day suggesting out of the blue that maybe, just maybe certain trends in the entries were suggesting that you need a vacation or your business is in peril or your kid is abusing drugs or that you probably have cancer. If such knowledge was hidden in your web log data, wouldn’t you rather know than not?

Read the rest in i, cringely’s column.

Ray Charles Passes Away

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“Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead,” he told the Washington Post in 1983. “I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.”

He did. More at CNN.